Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed

Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed

Excerpt

Many years ago, I chanced on a thoroughly mysterious character who made a fleeting appearance in history as the sole army scout to stick with Gen. George A. Custer to the last fatal minutes in the legendary Battle of the Little Bighorn. Though he was obviously competent, courageous, and faithful, the references divulged little more than that he was half Sioux and half white, and no two persons spelled his name the same way. Where had he come from? How had he mastered his demanding trade? And why was he fighting against his own tribesmen?

Haunted by this shadowy figure, I uncovered his story, bit by piece and over years. He was the son of a French trader and a Sioux mother, and his name proved to be Michel Boyer, but his friends called him Mitch. His thirty-nine years of adventures were interesting enough in themselves, but they also took place in the context of a fascinating movement not well delineated by history. That movement was the gradual encroachment of white civilization on the lands of the western division of . . .

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